CV Raman: The Nobel laureate who made India proud with the ‘Raman Effect’

Team Udayavani, Mar 14, 2020, 3:54 PM IST

C V Raman was an Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science in India.

C V Raman was born on November 7, 1888 in Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu. His father Chandrashekhara Aiyar was a lecturer in Mathematics and Physics and so at a young age, he was exposed to an academic environment. His mother’s name was Parvathi Ammal.

C. V. Raman was an intelligent and brilliant student since his early childhood.

• At the age of 11, he passed his matriculation and 12th class at the age of 13 with a scholarship

• In 1902, he joined the Presidency College and received his graduate degree in 1904. That time, he was the only student who received the first division.

• He did his Masters in Physics from the same college and broke all the previous records.

• In 1907, he got married to Lokasundari Ammal and had two sons namely Chandrasekhar and Radhakrishnan.

• For 10 years Raman worked as a civil servant in the Indian Finance Department in Calcutta, rising quickly to a senior position.

• In 1917 he was offered the newly endowed Palit Chair of Physics at Calcutta University and decided to accept it.

• During this period he continued doing research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) in Calcutta.

• Raman’s ground-breaking experiment at the IACS, in the year 1928 eventually earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.

• February 28, the day of the discovery, has since then been celebrated as National Science Day in India.

• Raman had a collaborator in this experiment, K S Krishnan, Raman’s co-worker but he did not share the Nobel Prize due to some professional differences between the two. However, Raman strongly mentioned Krishnan’s contributions in his Nobel acceptance speech.

• The man who discovered the nucleus and the proton, Dr Ernest Rutherford, referred to Raman’s spectroscopy in his presidential address to the Royal Society in 1929. Raman received a knighthood from them as well.

• Raman was the paternal uncle of Subrahmanyan Chandrashekar, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1983 for the discovery of Chandrashekhar limit in 1931

• In 1954, C V Raman was awarded Bharat Ratna.

• In 1970, Raman had a major heart attack while working in the laboratory. He took his last breath in the Raman Research Institute on 21st November, 1970.